Feelin' Alright

Ahoy shipmates, and welcome aboard. Lately, I've been writing vlog-style [lifestyle] posts so let's keep up in that fashion. The last two weeks I've been ranting a lot, a lot about hard work at the retail gig, Marxist theory, the stompin' upon the proletariat...blah blah blah. The truth is that within the last couple of weeks I've been feeling that work was becoming overwhelming. That the proletariat is being used and abused. Or something like that. 

I almost became a Marxist. That's one of my best jokes I've come up with recently. I was so fed up with working that I wanted to become a Marxist. Going so far as to consider spending my time reading more Marx and Engels, and Adorno, my music mentor's hero. I would say that I have a lot of Leftist influences and that my general political ideology is more aligned with that, rather than say, a pure form of straight capitalism, which we have seen now in 2019, no longer works. But that's an op-ed column for another day, wouldn't you say? 

So today rolls on by. I chilled with some friends and we did the same usual stuff. We played Smash Ultimate in three-player free for all, ate lunch, talked, and listened to some music on YouTube. I didn't take a Lyft from my friends' to work. Rather, I took the bus. The bus took about forty minutes because it was a slow bus on a Sunday, the laziest of all bus days. 

During the wait, I stood the entire time. I was mostly surveying the image of the valley canyons. I saw a customer who happened to be taking the bus and I told him how great the weather was, and how beautiful the valleys looked, and that we were lucky to live here. "Yeah, man, we're blessed." Being able to just stand around, enjoy the weather, and take in the scenery really calmed me down. It brought it all to me right there: dasein, time and being, the worldhood of the world. The important stuff I learned from Heidegger's Being and Time. Which one might say has to be experienced first before you even try to explain.

Long story short. Sometimes all it takes is a moment of self-reflection to realize how great life is, and how your impact on your world, community, etc, makes the world a better place if you will it, allow it, and make it so. "When you smile, the whole world smiles with you." It's actually true. The more upbeat and happy I am at work, the more people want to talk to me, and find out more about me. Likewise, the more gloomy I am, the fewer people want to talk to me. This goes back to a post I wrote some six months ago about how I had an epiphany about happiness, changing the way you think to attain this more often, regularly, etc. I'm no guru or anything. Rather, I am just a young grasshopper trying to attain enlightenment. 

One of the most liberating feelings in the world is being happy amongst others: family, friends, coworkers, customers, and managers. The other is being happy with yourself. Find the balance between the two and the universe seems to open up, engulfing you in a sea of happiness [or something like that lol].  "They call me mellow yellow...quite right."

It can be something simple like standing around, contemplating the canyons. Or it could be something more complicated like meditation. Whatever way you find it, when you find it, try not to lose it. However, if you do, remember you can always pick up where you last left off.  Even life has a pause button.

"When you smile, the whole world smiles with you."